Mother-Daughter Murder Night(51)
“And Ricardo?”
“Ricardo was a true believer. More than a believer. The boy was a prophet.”
Lana remembered the photograph of the long-haired, bright-eyed young man in hiking sandals. “What do you mean?”
Victor looked back at the map. “It takes most people many years to learn this business. Conservation science, land use technicalities, legal paperwork, and of course the delicate relationships with our land stewards, our donors. For Ricardo, it was instinctual, like he was choreographing a dance between land, owners, and lawyers.”
“What made him so good at it?”
“It’s in his blood. His grandparents came to the Pajaro Valley in the 1950s as braceros, and his father carried on as a farmer. When Ricardo was small, he and his mother left to live with her sister inland because of some kind of difficulty, but he came back as an adult. Farmers here know the Cruz name. They trust it. Ricardo was able to accomplish more in two years than others here have achieved in ten. Sometimes he played it a bit loose. But he got results.” Victor fixed his eyes on Lana. “He helped donors see what it might be for land to be truly public. To be not owned by any of us, but stewarded and cared for, honored and preserved.”
“This is what he was helping Mr. Rhoads with? Donating the ranch to the public?”
“We were on the path to making that vision real.”
“May I see what he was working on? Before he . . .”
A sudden grimace twisted Victor’s face into a rush of emotion, red-hot and pained. Then, as quickly as it had come, the storm passed. His eyes settled, and he was back again. Lana had to blink to convince herself the look hadn’t been a mirage.
“One moment,” he said.
Lana walked to the door and watched as Victor approached a long glass cabinet lining the rear wall of the open office. He made a careful selection and walked back toward her carrying two thick hardback binders.
They settled at the table in the library, the binders between them.
“These were Ricardo’s projects,” he said. “Masterpieces, every one.” He slid them toward Lana with a sad smile.
“I miss him,” he said.
Lana was always suspicious of a man with tears in his eyes. She placed the binders side by side, running her hand over the textured canvas cover of the one on the right.
“He sounds very special,” she said. “Did you know much about his life outside of work?”
Victor hesitated for a moment before answering. “Ricardo was devoted to his work. And a handsome young man. I imagine he had girlfriends, but I wasn’t familiar with his romantic life.”
Lana wondered if the detectives had found any angry exes worth investigating. For now she focused on the information at hand. She looked down at the binders. “May I take a closer look at these? I might find something that can send the detectives in a more appropriate direction. So you can have peace, and justice, for Ricardo.”
“Justice would be welcomed.” Victor took one last, longing look at the binders. For a moment Lana thought he was going to grab them back from her and whisk them away. But then he nodded. “Take all the time you need.”
He rose, turned, and tipped an imaginary hat. Then he walked out, closing the library door firmly behind him so she would not be disturbed.
Perfect.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The first thing Lana did was take the aspirin. And another one. Her head was throbbing in time with her left arm, and Victor’s history lesson hadn’t helped.
She shoved aside the pain and started working her way through Saint Ricardo’s land conquests. He certainly had been busy. Lana counted seventeen projects in the binders, hundreds of pages of correspondence, site maps, and contracts. Some projects were small, like a single-acre lot inhabited by endangered salamanders. Others were complex, involving multiple parties and pages of legalese. Each project file ended with a letter of agreement between the property owner and the land trust and a handwritten thank-you note. The flowery signatures on monogrammed notecards spoke of an earlier time, when penmanship and stewardship were drilled into would-be land barons.
But not every project file was complete. The file on Hal Rhoads’s property appeared midway through the second binder, one of three projects in progress when Ricardo died. The thin file contained mostly printed emails and a calendar of meetings stretching back six months. Ricardo visited Hal weekly, at first with Victor, then later, on his own. The men toured the ranch. Ate picnics. It looked less like a business transaction than a multigenerational bromance, complete with horse rides over the hillside.
And, strangely, medical appointments. The Rhoads project calendar showed some listings for an unspecified doctor on Wednesdays. It seemed Ricardo had been accompanying Hal to a regular checkup, presumably one trivial enough that a non-relative could take him. Blood tests, maybe. Lana thought of her own datebook, the business meetings replaced with DR this and DR that. She hated having her daughter chauffeur her like a child, to appointments she wouldn’t have chosen, days drained of her own control.
The rest of the Rhoads file focused on the ranch—parcel descriptions, maps, lists of active leases. There were grainy black-and-white photographs and historical documents that had been photocopied several times, not always at right angles. Before she flipped each page, Lana took a photograph with her phone, figuring she could make better sense of it on a day when the words weren’t vibrating off the page. She imagined Beth rolling her eyes at her with every click.